iRobot closes Durham facility, cuts 30 local jobs

Public company iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq: IRBT) said late Tuesday that it will close its Durham plant, where it produced its Seaglider robot for defense, as part of a larger plan to lay off 13 percent of its workforce across the company.

The Bedford, Mass.-based company is stopping production of the Seaglider robots immediately. Thirty local employees will lose their jobs due to the closure – part of 80 fulltime job cuts around the whole company. Forty of the cuts will be in Bedford, and 10 are remote employees.

The company said it is making the changes to address slowing demand, as the election year has given rise to mixed messages from the federal government as to its appetite for defense robots.

“This is part of restructuring due to broad and significant defense cuts, continuing resolution and looming sequestration,” says spokesman Matthew Lloyd.

In its third quarter earnings, iRobot announced it expects its defense and security business unit revenue to decline 30 to 40 percent in 2013 from the $75 million to $80 million level in 2012.

“As a result, iRobot must realign and right-size the business based on our current visibility into defense spending and financial expectations,” he says.

The iRobot Seaglider is a deep-diving unmanned vehicle designed for lengthy missions covering thousands of miles, and is supposed to collect data at a fraction of the cost of traditional research vessels and instruments. But Lloyd says the company will no longer be producing “Seaglider” because unmanned underwater vehicles didn’t take off in the industry as iRobot expected.